‘Splitsville’ Review: When Screwball Chaos Meets Modern Indie Anxiety

Humor is notoriously difficult to define with universal aesthetic standards. What amuses one viewer may leave another completely cold—or even annoyed. The architecture of comedy can be appreciated on paper or in theory—physical gags, verbal exchanges, narrative setups, formal rhythm—yet none of that guarantees actual laughter. Splitsville operates constantly in this unstable space: the film can be simultaneously irritating and intriguing, frustrating in its character logic yet admirable in its formal commitment and the sheer determination director Michael Angelo Covino shows in pulling off a comedy that feels unusually abrasive for something that still plays close to mainstream Hollywood.

Covino (The Climb) once again teams up with Kyle Marvin, who co-writes and co-stars. The two play lifelong friends who behave like adolescents despite being around 40—chaotic, egocentric, petty, sometimes aggressive, and often simply foolish. They function less as recognizably human characters than as comedic archetypes, and that choice positions the film in a tonal corner from which it never quite escapes. The physical, visual humor aims big, but it never fully clicks with the more sincere, semi-dramatic ambitions of this story about two couples in various stages of collapse. It feels at times like two films layered over each other—an impression reinforced in multiple ways.

Carey (Marvin) is newly married to Ashley (Adria Arjona), and the couple is driving toward a long-awaited vacation when she casually announces mid-commute —and mid–chaotic automotive peril involving oral sex—that she wants to see other people. Or rather, that she already is. Carey flees in shock and ends up at the home of his friend Paul (Covino), a real estate developer living with Julie (Dakota Johnson) and their precocious son. Paul and Julie explain that they have an open relationship, implying that such arrangements eliminate jealousy and emotional volatility. Their home life quickly proves otherwise. When Paul is away “on business,” Julie sleeps with Carey, Paul finds out, and events spiral—emotionally and physically, including the destruction of their stylish home.

From this setup emerges an anti–romantic comedy of desperation: two men trying to win back their partners—or at least learn to tolerate their boundaries—while competing, scheming, sabotaging and collapsing under their own insecurities. A child observes and absorbs every dysfunctional impulse, mirroring the adults with painful clarity. Paul and Carey differ superficially—Paul is harsher and more abrasive, Carey softer and seemingly more considerate—but both are variations on the same hollow type: calculating, self-involved, intellectually shallow, and yet convinced that their wit and charisma make them irresistible to women as luminous as Arjona and Johnson.

This leads to the film’s strangest gamble. Two indie actor-filmmakers collide here with two much more mainstream actresses, and the tonal mismatch is deliberate and striking. Covino and Marvin behave as if inhabiting a prickly cringe comedy not far from The Climb; Johnson and Arjona play something closer to a more grounded romantic dramedy. Their screen presence, performance rhythms and emotional registers differ so significantly that it often feels like parallel films are unfolding side by side—forced to coexist but never fully integrated. The characters manage to coexist within the story; the styles do not. The resulting dissonance never fully resolves.

At times, Splitsville resembles an Adam Sandler film drained of the sweetness and vulnerability that make Sandler’s characters relatable, leaving the viewer little emotional foothold in the protagonists’ supposed heartbreak. Any moment that threatens real tenderness is immediately undercut by a crude joke, an awkward gag, or a comedic escalation that exists solely to puncture emotion. And yet, the film can also be impressive. Covino is enamored of long takes and uses them relentlessly—sometimes to stage large-scale physical chaos or elaborately choreographed fights, sometimes simply to move fluidly through domestic spaces. The former often pay off; the latter can feel more like the showboating of a creator who, much like his characters, wants to be noticed.

What Splitsville undeniably offers is something atypical for contemporary Hollywood romantic comedy. Its DNA reaches back to the screwball classics of the 1940s and their 1970s reinterpretations, mixing verbal acidity, physical slapstick and an anxious pursuit of romantic fulfillment. The crucial difference is that classics like Bringing Up Baby or homages like What’s Up, Doc? benefited from stars with magnetism and couples with chemistry. Here, that spark exists mostly on the shoulders of Arjona and Johnson, who convey confusion, selfishness and humanity with a natural ease that the male protagonists never quite achieve.

Ultimately, Splitsville is a comedy convinced that its feuding man-children are far more fascinating—both to their partners and to audiences—than they actually are. Instead, the film exposes them as what they appear to be beneath the elaborate staging and bluster: two deluded idiots who happen to be extremely lucky.